June 2009 | By Jane Leung Larson
The California Student Media Festival’s 2009 Grand Prize in the Multimedia Division at the Secondary level was won by 200 Ralston Middle School students of Belmont, San Mateo County, for their multi-media productions on China. Their teachers, Gary Means (social studies) and Steve Pomeroy (animation), participated in the 2007 Committee of 100-sponsored “Silk Roads to Silicon Highways” Summer Institute in China. Bringing their China experience into the classroom sparked the creativity and enhanced the cultural understanding of their students, as can be seen in the winning productions. More than 6,000 California students compete in the Festival, and, remarkably, Ralston’s sixth to eighth graders were victorious against much older students. Said Pomeroy, “We have been trying to come up with a way to beat the high schools. I think we found the formula. One on one we stand no chance but 200 middle school students working on one project are pretty hard to beat.”
The students produced three videos, which were packaged together for the competition. Karen Clancy, C-100 Education Consultant, gave this description: “One video took the mascots of the Beijing Olympics and made the characters move; e.g., shoot a basketball or hit a tennis ball. Another video animated Chinese paintings in subtle ways so that the leaves fluttered, an animal blinked, and so on. The third video was titled “The Beautiful Yangtze” and combined student poetry with digitized photos of the Three Gorges Dam and the Yangtze River trip taken during the Summer Institute and put to music with the school orchestra led by teacher Jordan Webster.
“The Beautiful Yangtze” can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzU2N2Vdf8E
Clancy reports that this year’s Summer Institute for San Mateo County teachers runs from June 29 to July 19. “This year, we will go to Beijing, Xi'an, Chongqing, the Yangtze River cruise, and Wuhan. While we are in Wuhan, the U.S. Consulate General Wendy Lyle has agreed to meet with us and talk about US-China Relations.”
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